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The British still expect London to be strafed in event of war, but they are confident that much as its buildings may be damaged, with its new defenses life cannot be made impossible in the metropolis. They are certain that if London is not wrecked in two weeks, it will never be wrecked and the Germans will lose the war. Other areas which are virtually certain of becoming battlegrounds because of the airplane are the great industrial areas of the British Midlands and the German Ruhr. These would be battles of industrial attrition, productive of great wreckage but effective in the military sense., as blockade is effective, chiefly by cutting off war supplies. Wars of attrition are the costliest, and in a prolonged war these areas might be battlefields from beginning to end.
Back to Napoleon? To force Germany to fight on two fronts, to cut her off from the oil and grain fields of East Europe is vital to England and France. To do so they must help their allies in the East. Once war begins, they will be practically cut off from sending aid to Poland, which aims to fight a delaying war, retreating bloodily to Warsaw and the Vistula. If they are also cut off from Turkey, Rumania and Greece, they will not be able to use any of their strength to squeeze Germany between pincers.
Italy threatens to cut them off. The military brains of London and Paris will be virtually forced to devote their attention to clearing out the Mediterranean, to pulverizing Italian opposition on sea and land, in order to open their communications from Gibraltar to the Bosporus.
If this strategy is adopted military history may take a running broad jump back to Napoleonic times, when domination of Spain and the Po River Valley of northern Italy bulked large in the campaigns of the French.
The Peninsula. The Chamberlain and Daladier Governments have been savagely criticized for letting Spain fall into.the hands of Fascist Franco, who is now in a position to train big guns on Britain's Gibraltar from the landward side. The result of this strategic boner is that the British can no longer count on Gibraltar as a firm support for naval operations along the British Mediterranean lifeline, that France is worried about submarine and airplane attacks on her Marseille-Algiers shipping from Italy's Sardinia and the Spanish Balearic Islands. But Spain is not necessarily a fatal loss to Britain and France. Along the Pyrenees (see map, pp. 28 & 29) the French have railway spurs running up into high country at the Spanish border; the Spanish, on the other hand, have few such spurs—and also few good roads.
This means that on the offense the French would have a dozen jumping-off places for diversions to mask a drive over one of the three main routes into Spain. If, as is more likely, they decided to quarantine Spain for the duration of the war, a comparative handful of French soldiers could be shuttled from end to end of the Pyrenees holding at bay a much larger number of Spaniards who would not have the advantage of such a transportation network.